Hi there, been quite some time since I wrote something down here. But I’m back with some great news! Starting from February 9th I’ll be at Online Graphics in Kortrijk, working together with Miquël Vermeulen on our SBP-project called MobileJuice. I can hear you thinking right now, what the hell are those 2 going to do there. Well, let me explain.

What is SBP?

SBP (Small Business Project) is a module we have at school. Its purpose is to teach us some marketing knowledge. You have to develop your own business idea and prepare everything like you would if you would really start that company (businessplan with a financial plan, marketing plan, commercial plan,…). But only a few of these projects actually go ‘live’. Together with Miquël I chose to go live because we really believe in our idea (at first our group counted five members, but only the two of us wanted to go through with it). Last Thursday we had to give a final presentation in front of an audience consisting of experienced businesspeople whom we had to convice that we got what it takes to survive in the cruel businessworld :). Armed with a shiny keynote-presentation and a lot of guts we tried to do just that! And I think we did pretty good :).

What the Deuce is MobileJuice?

We chose MobileJuice as our company name and “Squeezing Your Phone” as the main tagline. So we want to squeeze everything out your phone, basically meaning that we want to unlock the full potential of your smartphone by bringing you cool mobile applications and games. We believe that 2009 is a very important year for mobile. The iPhone has been a real catalysator to this whole thing. People want information everywhere they are and they want to view it in a way that best suits the device they are using. So we really believe that now is the good moment to jump on this fairly new market.

We are offering 2 types of products. On the one hand we want to deliver mobile applications to consumers (B2C: Business To Consumer) through the AppStore (iPhone), Handango (Windows Mobile) and Pocketgear.com (Windows Mobile). On the other hand we want to deliver mobile websites to companies (B2B: Business To Business). A mobile site is totally different from a desktop website. The screen of a mobile phone doesn’t allow to have a lot of information on it. So we need to provide the user with good information shown in an efficient way. Next to that we also offer mobile applications to companies. Some companies like to (for example) check their stock at any given moment. Wouldn’t it be supereasy to give the appropriate employees a smartphone with our application installed on it so they can check out the current stock of all the items without having to run to a computer somewhere.

So currently we are only developing applications for iPhone and Windows Mobile, we’ll be expanding to Symbian OS and Blackberry soon. That way we reach the biggest part of the smartphone market!

We already got 1 application completely sorted out, it just needs to be developed So hang on, more news about our first Business to Consumer application coming soon. (Together with a neat commercial I made)

So you go.. err.. ‘live’?

Yes we do, thanks for asking. This means that we are going to do an internship in our own company (MobileJuice). Other non-live-students are doing an internship in an existing company. So we don’t get the real experience of working together with other developers in a company. But thanks to Online Graphics we get some of that experience. These kind people gave us a room in their company because they also believe in our idea and want to help young entrepreneurs like us. We also get support from Netlog, who are going to help us develop suiting Netlog applications to our mobile applications. So thanks Netlog (especially Folke Lemaitre) and Lab9/Online Graphics!! These companies believe in us and it’s so good to know that real experienced people are behind us. Also thanks to Claudia Eeckhout, the SBP-representative for our group. She really pushed us and motivated us to believe that what we had was good. Claudia is a really good motivator. So thanks to her because I maybe wouldn’t have gone through with it without her.

So that’s it, I hope to bring you all more news about MobileJuice soon. I’m super excited about my first steps in the business world. 

Greets

Yesterday I went to the mobile seminar hosted by The Reference at NH Hotels in Ghent with 2 colleagues. We arrived just on time and I was immediately impressed by the beautiful venue. It looked very nice and was well organized.

We started a little bit to late but I didn’t bother. We got welcomed by someone from The Reference who passed on the mic to another employee of theirs. He introduced us to the new mobile landscape and told us that he believed it wouldn’t be like this right now without the iPhone. I agree with him because the iPhone was the first ever device who brought the internet into your pocket. The figures that I saw from Google last week clearly proved that. This person also had some interesting figures, for example 38% of the phones in Belgium are 3G ready but only 9% is using 3G at the moment. While in other EU countries like Germany, France and Italy approx. 30% use 3G. It’s obvious that the cause for this significant lower number in Belgium is because of the high cost data rate plans in Belgium. He also wanted us to know that 2009 will be the year of mobile, it’s a booming business. I’m motivated to hop on the mobile “train” and contribute. Again we were made clear that a desktop site and a mobile site are NOT THE SAME. You should adapt to the device the visitor uses to browse to your site. The Reference reviewed 40 websites from the biggest companies in Belgium and they concluded that only 14% is “mobile ready”. They had this tool which they used for in-house testing of these sites. It was interesting but quite repetitive because I’ve been to Web Goes Mobile last week.

Next up was a French mobile specialist from Lille, his session was in French and he spoke very quickly. I was suprised that I understood 80-90% of what he said. He wanted to make clear that there is a new trend arising. Companies want a mobile site and sometimes a mobile application, to attract users to the brand, to give them a feeling of participation, they  want the user to feel part of the brand.

He showed us Google Mobile Ads and Admob, a way to make your applications cost-free but win money from advertisement. Another thing I didn’t know about was that the W3C also has a standard for mobile called W3C MobileOK.

After a short break they showed us 3 cases: De Redactie + Sporza, Telenet and Truvo. The Reference had been developing these mobile sites for these companies and I have to say that I really like the mobile site from De Redactie. I would like the possibility to view videos from Sporza on my smartphone aswell. But they said it was in the making. De Redactie + Sporza sites were testcases and have been approved by VRT now, the results are good. This, again, proves that 2009 will be the year of mobile! The sites made for Telenet (Zita) and Truvo were impressive aswell. These sites are automatically adjusted to the type of device. If u have a low-end smartphone then you get the low-end version, without images.

Last but not least was Siruna. A spin-off from a Belgian university. They made this impressive online tool called Composer (visit it at composer.siruna.com) to transform a desktop site into a mobile site. I’ll try out composer myself and blog about it later, it looked very promising though. This company helped The Reference to develop the sites for VRT, Telenet and Truvo. They also developed sites like imdb.siruna.com, delijn.siruna.com and www.filebeeld.be (where you can see images from cameras on the Belgian roads to see if a certain traffic jam is big or rather small).

Afterwards we all got down to the bar and were treated with wine and some snacks. It was another fun seminar, it’s cool to go to these events, meet people and get connected! Thanks to my buddy, Robbe Vandecasteele, for the picture!

Greetings

The kind people from MobileWeb.be have uploaded the presentations from the seminar last thursday. I would strongly recommend to check them out! Thanks also to MobileWeb.be for putting a link to my thoughts on the seminar on their blog! You can read it HERE.

This thursday I’ll be attending “The Reference Academy: Mobile means more” Seminar at Ghent. I really hope it will be as inspiring as the Web Goes Mobile Seminar was. Check back to read my thoughts about it later on (by the end of the week). I’m a little bit dissapointed I can’t attend the FlexCamp organised by the Adobe User Group Belgium though.

Thursday I went to the Web Goes Mobile Seminar in Grimbergen at Salons de Romrée with my partner Miquël Vermeulen and a friend, Dimitri Van Heucke from MobileMinds. We were welcomed with a nice breakfast. At 9 o’clock MobileWeb.be, the host of the event, gave us a quick overview of what would turn out to be a great seminar.

The first speaker was Nanno Palte (from InSites Consulting) who showed us the results of a large survey his company had done to be able to know what is going on today from a mobile point of view. He showed us some interesting figures. Did you know that only 9% uses 3G on a regular basis? That 30% of the owners of a mobile phone buy a new one each year? He also plotted some of the key figures so we got a real good overview of the treats we, as mobile developers, need to work on and which are slowly dying. The basic applications (calendar,…) are still the most sold applications.

Next up was Peter Vandermeersch from the Corelio group, owner of De Standaard (a famous newspaper in Belgium), Het Nieuwsblad (another famous newspaper), Spotter etc. He gave us an insight on how Corelio benefits of the possibilities the mobile market holds. There was a very interesting strategy he showed us which he called the 0-1-7 strategy. Basically it means that you can feed the people with news on different times if you represent that news in a different way. The 0 stands for today, something happens today and gets posted to their mobile sites directly. This type of news is short and straightforward. The 1 stands for the news of yesterday which is being published in the newspaper or on De Standaard or Nieuwsblad websites in a more extended version, still straightforward but we get more side-information. And finally the 7 stands for the way they publish the same news in the weekend-newspaper (Passe-Partout). Where they look at the news from a different angle so people get another insight into that same news. This way the user gets informed in a really great way and is offered with the most complete vision on the facts. They also showed off their mobile sites (made by MobileWeb.be). I’m definitely going to bookmark this on my mobile phone.

After Peter’s talk we got a short coffee break and then got back to the conference room where we listened to Paul Golding, a mobile 2.0 expert who is working for Wireless Wanders at the moment and has worked for many big companies including O2, Motorola. He also writes books about the mobile evolution. Before he started with his talk he snapped a picture from the audience to send it to his kids :). Basically what he told us is that we need to understand that the mobile web isn’t the same as the web we are browsing everyday on our computers. We can’t just make a website for use on desktop computers and expect our customers to watch that same site on their mobile device, it’s not done. We have to create a separate site for our mobile viewers and focus on the user experience, which is very very important. It’s different on a mobile device than it is on a desktop computer. This means that sometimes you have to go for a simple and lightweight site instead of a nice looking but heavier site for mobile use. He was really inspiring and you could see that he loves his work and is driven to help the mobile community.

After P Golding’s motivating talk came a person from MobileWeb.be who showed us what his company exactly does and what they are doing to make the mobile web a better place :).

Last but not least was Marc Vanlerberghe (Google), who showed us some figures based on Google searches. First he showed the number of mobile phones per brand. Than the plotted toe Google searches on top of them weighted with the number of devices per brand. iPhone was on top with like 8 times more searches then the second one. It is and was clear to us that the iPhone has the best mobile browser out there. These figures don’t lie. In my point of view the iPhone has really been a catalysator in the evolution of the mobile web. Other manufacturers are trying to bring the same mobile experience to their device and this is a good thing for the mobile market. He showed us the different applications Google has made for mobile devices and that the technology they created can be used freely. He showed us WikiTude, an example of an application made which used the location-function of Google Maps to give live Wikipedia information from objects the user is watching on his mobile phone through the camera, that was STUNNING, to say the least! Check out this video about WikiTude’s travel guide mode:

Then he talked about Android, which is a good concept to me. It’s OpenSource, so you can just make your own modifications to the Android OS and publish it. They also have an Android Market where they are going to sell their mobile applications. The Android market though is limited, I mean that not everyone can post their applications on there, you have to meet with certain agreements. So in my point of view it isn’t that open. But it’s definitely more open than the Apple AppStore. But I’m looking forward to Android and I want to test it soon!

The seminar closed with a nice lunch (great food!) and some networking, I got in touch with some interesting people who maybe want to partner with us to create our mobile application. It was a great seminar and I’m happy to have been a part of it. Thanks to Dimitri to help me get acquainted with the good way of networking.

That’s it, see you next time

Bowtie is a new OS X app brought to you by Laurent Baumann from Slightly Pretentious Software (from Façade, which is coming soon, and Architect, which is currently in public beta). I’m a big fan of Slighty Pretentious because they’re going to bring big change in the way skinning is done since Leopard came along. I’ll blog about those other 2 jewels later, back to Bowtie!

Bowtie is an application silimar to CoverSutra and CoverStream, it allows you to control iTunes with shortcuts, submit your songs to Last.fm, it has a supereasy xHTML+CSS+JavaScript based theming system and it’s FREE. It’s still in Beta, I’m using it for a couple of days now and I’m liking this so far. It’s lightweight, scrobbles to Last.fm seamlessly, and I’m loving the themes! It’s also extremely simple to make your own? I’m especially liking this one: 

This theme fits in very nicely with my neat desk. It slides to the side when you double click it, and when you need it, just click it once and there it is again. I’ll be making my own Bowtie theme anytime soon to really meet my personal needs.

Needless to say, I’m really loving this app right here, and all of you should check it out as well ! It’s free, why wouldn’t you. Start using Bowtie today! Get it here! Get the unbearable theme pack by Lauren Baumann on MacThemes, a great resource for all your skinning and wallpaper needs!

Greets.

I’m getting fairly excited about the iPhone project I’m working on and I wanted to share it with you all. Me and my project partners are getting closer and closer to determining the final form of the application(s) and it’s functionalities. That is on paper of course. I’ll give out more details about the exact functionalities later on. We are currently presenting a keynote to a couple of interested individuals and companies who could be of great help in the development. But more about that later, as I said before. What I can share with you is a couple of my favourite resources.

RESOURCES (Part 1):

- As I mentioned before, I’m reading this great book by Erica Sadun called “The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, Building Applications With The iPhone SDK”. This book has been a great help to me this far. Well structured, well documented and full of useful recipes and source code. Get it at Amazon, Play.com or Bol.com.

- I found that they give iPhone Developer classes at the university of Stanford. How cool is that? Wish they had classes like that at our school Anyway, they have an online resource site where you can check out source files, class material and more. I have to say it’s quite impressive. See for yourself.

- The iCodeBlog is cool aswell to check out a random tutorial. This dude owns FreshApps.com aswell, a site where you can rate iPhone applications.

I’ll tell you more about other resources along the way.

MOBISTAR AND THE IPHONE

When I heard Mobistar was going provide the iPhone on the Belgian market I was a little pissed, their 3G-network isn’t as good as Proximus’.

When I heard Mobistar was pricing the iPhone at €525 (8GB) and €615 (16GB) I was even more pissed. These prices are far to high in comparison with other countries.

And now Mobistar is offering the iPhone at €99 + a €25 payment each month during 18 months. I’m guessing a lot of impulsive people will jump on this deal but who wants to pay €25 each month without even having some kind of data plan. This is another nasty trick by Mobistar. They’ll probably fool a lot of people. I read about this on Ronny Welter’s blog, I just wanted to post my own opinion about this.

Anyway, this has been written quite fast after my first post about this subject. I guess I’ll never be able to keep up posting at this rate. I hope some of you actually read this, give me some feedback.

Thanx

This is the first in a series of many blogposts about me getting into developing for the iPhone. The iPhone is a very appealing platform, it has a beautiful big screen and a lovely multi-touch interface. I’m not going to go into the advantages of the iPhone because we all now what those are. I was interested in developing for the iPhone as soon as the SDK came out, but why do I really want to get started right now?

The reason for that is quite easy. In school we have this subject called SBP (Small Business Project). It was created to give young people some sense of doing business. Maybe we’ll want to start our own company in a couple of years and this will surely make that process easier. So you have to choose a product of which you think would appeal to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure that your idea looks good on paper (having a good business plan, cost analysis,…). And the last step is to really go out and produce the product.

I (and some fellow students) have the idea of developing an iPhone app. I will tell you more about the functionalities later. The main idea for this application isn’t really new, but we have quite a few tricks up our sleeves to make this application attractive. My job is to create the iPhone app. My partner in crime, Miquël Vermeulen, is going to develop the Windows Mobile version of the app.

How did i get started?

• I downloaded the iPhone SDK from the Apple developer website.
  The SDK is stunning to say the least. It provides you with the all tools you need. It has a very good IDE called XCode, the iPhone Simulator, Instruments (a tool to check the performance of your app so you can quickly see where the app needs some more work) and Interface Builder.
• I bought the book “The iPhone Developer Cookbook” by Erica Sadun.
  This book is very well structured and well documented. It helps you to get started quickly. This book suggests that you have knowledge of Objective C, the main programming language used on the Macintosh platform. I don’t have that knowledge but I’m quite sure my knowledge of Java will get me somewhere.

But it’s not only the development of the app that is going to take some time. We also have to get some people interested in our idea and project because all of this costs money, money we don’t have being poor students. So far it’s been fun to get in touch with all these interesting people. I’m sure I will learn a lot through this project and from these people. This will surely be a very important period in my further career as a developer. That’s it for the first post. Check back later to keep in touch with how things are developing.

Greets

Brecht

I’ve been having this nasty problem with BitmapData, I wanted to make a copy of a MovieClip to use it as a reflection of the original MovieClip. This is easy ofcourse using the BitmapData.draw() function. But this only works for MovieClips with the registration point in the top left corner, the draw() method only draws positive data. I found this to be a real pain in the ass because the registration point needed to be in the center for my animations to work good. And halleluja, I found a solution! Using a matrix object I changed the area the draw method should draw into the whole MovieClip. Here’s my code:

var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(my_mc.width,my_mc.height,true,0xFFFFFF);

var m:Matrix = new Matrix();

m.translate(my_mc.width/2,my_mc.height/2);

bmd.draw(my_mc,m);

var bitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bmd);

addChild(bitmap);

I hope I helped some of you with this, because I didn’t really read a good solution on the internet for this problem. If you have any questions, just e-mail me at: mail@brechtfourneau.be

Currently working very hard on my portfolio, I hope I can show it to you all quickly (if anyone ever really reads this)

See you.

Let me start off with telling you who I am, I’m a 20 year old Multimedia-student @ Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen (PIH) in Kortrijk.  I’m passionated with designing (in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator) and coding (I like to work with Java and ActionScript).

Other hobbies of me are watching television series (Fringe, Heroes, Lost, Dexter, Family Guy,..) and listening to a wide variety of music, from groups like Pink Floyd and The Doors to nifty electronic music by, for example, Boys Noize. I enjoy going out with friends, being in contact with other people and sharing experiences.

The reason I created this blog is to share with you what I’m all about and so on, I want to evolve to become a better developer and designer and I think it would be cool to see this evolution on my blog. I just got back from what you may call a teambuilding weekend with all the guys and a few girls from the Multimedia-course. It was very inspiring to me and it made me get really excited and determined to grow and try to reach a higher level. I hope I can eventually get there.

So, welcome here and check back soon.